Known policy-based computer network management arrangements do not clearly distinguish the goal, i.e. the “what”, of management from the policy, i.e. the “how”, that achieves the goal. Indeed, most known policy-based management (PBM) arrangements require a system administrator to specify policies as declarative rules of the form “if event/condition then action.” From a system administrator's viewpoint, such rules represent a “high-level” specification of “what” needs to be achieved in terms of the network/system behavior. However, from the viewpoint of a client, i.e. the end user of a service, such rules represent a “low-level” specification of “how” the client's desired system behavior is to be achieved. This makes it difficult or impossible for clients without expertise in network management to express the desired system behavior in a way supported by known PBM arrangements. Instead, a system administrator typically translates the client's “high-level” description of the desired system behavior, i.e. service-level QoS goals, into “low-level” rule-based or procedural syntax of network management policies. To summarize, in the known PBM arrangements, there is no support for specifying the client's service-level QoS goals as part of the network management policy definition.